Did the account of the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. on X post a cartoon depicting U.S. President Donald Trump as having a tariff-related tantrum? No, that's not true: As of this writing, the account's entries did not include that image. Answering Lead Stories' questions, an embassy spokesperson denied that either its official account on X or any other account affiliated with the embassy posted the tantrum cartoon.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X published on April 21, 2025. It shared what looked like a screenshot of another entry that read:
'Breaking: 🚨 The Chinese embassy posted this picture on their X account. 🇨🇳🇺🇸'
This is what the post reviewed in this fact check looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The presence of the U.S. flag emoji beside the flag of the People's Republic of China implied that the post specifically referred to the Chinese embassy in the U.S.
On April 23, 2025, an embassy spokesperson told Lead Stories via email:
No, we didn't publish this image in question on our Embassy X or any other affiliated accounts.
The earliest versions of the cartoon showed up on social media April 16, 2025. On that day, it appeared on a Mandarin-speaking online message board (archived here) and Imgur (archived here).
On April 17, 2025, the image was featured in what appeared to be a news report (archived here) uploaded by a Taiwanese media company (archived here) on Instagram.
On the same day, a variation of the cartoon was published in a Mandarin-language post on X (archived here) that seemed to show a screenshot of some other entry.
On April 18, 2025, the cartoon was uploaded on X (archived here) by an English-language account claiming to be based in both China and San Francisco (archived here) and by another, partially Chinese-language account (archived here) that described itself as a "Media & News Company" based in Hong Kong (archived here). That account was only five months old, lacked verification checkmarks, did not display a professional logo and did not show a link to a company's website.
On the same day, one more account on X shared the cartoon (archived here). According to its self-description (archived here), that account was based in Rome but its bio written in Chinese characters read (as translated by Chrome) "Long live China, long live the Chinese nation".
Yet, none of those entries claimed that the image originated from the account of the Chinese embassy in the U.S. on X or was reposted by it.
The claim that is the focus of this article materialized on April 19, 2025. One of the first accounts (archived here) that published the variation of the image claiming it came from the Chinese embassy in the U.S. shared it on Instagram in a reel in which the cartoon was paired with a Russian-language song mentioning "tears on the cheeks".
The same account published several more claims about other tariff-related Trump cartoons purportedly shared by the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., as seen, for example, here (archived here) and here (archived here).
Lead Stories manually reviewed the account of the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. on X for the period between April 18, 2025, and April 23, 2025 (archived here), but, as of this writing, no entries displayed the image in question.
Lead Stories additionally checked the official account of that country's ambassador to the U.S., but the cartoon wasn't there, either.
Earlier in April 2025, the New York Times (archived here) reported that the Chinese government allowed a wave of memes mocking the United States on social media in China and beyond in the aftermath of the U.S. administration's decision to impose new tariffs on multiple countries, including China. Among the items that went viral were apparently ai-generated visuals of Trump using a sewing machine (archived here).
Official accounts representing China abroad participated.
On April 16, 2025, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. published an "Art of the Deal" cartoon (archived here) and on April 11, 2025, another image depicting a clash over tariffs (archived here) had appeared on its account on X. On April 17, 2025, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. posted a tariff-related cartoon (archived here) and then, on April 20, 2025, one more (archived here). Memes about it appeared on the embassy's official page on Facebook, as seen, for example, here (archived here), here (archived here), here (archived here) and here (archived here). However, none of those cartoons depicted Trump having a tantrum.
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